Leadership News and Headlines

Leaders Have Better Lives but Worse Days

Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report finds that managers of managers—defined as leaders—are more likely to rate their lives as thriving and report higher work engagement than the employees they supervise. At the same time, these leaders experience significantly more negative daily emotions, with stress, anger, sadness and loneliness each 7‑12 percentage points higher than individual contributors. The pattern varies by region; U.S. leaders report fewer negative emotions than their global peers, except for stress. Engagement mitigates the emotional burden, as engaged leaders show a 21‑point drop in loneliness and comparable negative‑emotion rates to non‑leaders.